Systems and companies that provide web analytics or web performance monitoring are numerous. The existing web analytics products are software that tracks how people view, use, or traverse through web sites. Most of these products originated for the analysis of static web pages, i.e., those consisting of text and still images rather than video or other “rich media.” The original web analytics vendors, while first specializing in the analytics of static web pages, have all broadened their scopes somewhat to include some degree of video analytics. All of these vendors appear to cover only traffic statistics and viewer engagement metrics, as they did for static web pages, when they analyze online video and thus do not cover quality of service at all.
Customers seeking more extensive analytics of online video have turned to more specialized video analytics vendors. One such vendor includes only viewer engagement statistics and does not cover quality of service at all. In fact, the focus of this vendor is on tracking traffic of videos posted to user-generated-content sites like YouTube, where they track only broad traffic statistics, not even detailed viewer engagement measures. Another vendor is presently marketed almost exclusively via an OEM arrangement with Nielsen and, as such, is heavily focused on audience measurement (traffic statistics and viewer engagement) and does not appear to cover quality of service. Yet another video analytics vendor has recently introduced some quality of service coverage which we believe to be minimal.
In addition to the products above, there currently exist end-to-end online video platform providers that offer software packages intended to meet all of the needs of online video publishers: ingestion, encoding, content management, player applications, advertising integration, and analytics such as shown in FIG. 1. Among the 60-100 vendors in this space, a few have made a particular effort to produce best-of-breed analytics elements. However, these analytics modules, presently, generally do not contain any quality-of-service elements At least one video platform provider sells an analytics module “a la carte” rather than solely bundled with the overall platform.
The web performance monitoring companies allow the customers to determine how long their web pages take to load, what their availability and down time are, etc. These web performance monitoring companies typically offer “panel based” analysis which may involve “agents” or “robot” servers that live in CDN data centers or it may rely on instrumentation of the PCs of a selection of real users from around the world (just as Nielsen has long instrumented the TVs of its “panels”). In any case, these approaches do not measure the real experiences of the “full census” (100% sample) of real users. In fact, the measurements are often limited to staged, advanced-scheduled tests covering very limited stretches of time. However, it is desirable to provide an analytics system that covers every play by every user and is always on.
The leading web performance monitoring companies originally developed their services to measure the performance of static web pages. Now, however, both leading companies in this space have developed products that measure key elements of performance specifically for online video. These products generally rely on the same agent- and panel-based approaches as their original products for static web pages and share the same weaknesses.
Thus, it is desirable to provide a video analytics for traffic, quality of service and engagement system and method that overcomes the limitations of current systems and it is to this end that the disclosure is directed.